Epstein Data Wiki

Reid Weingarten

Properties2
tagsperson, lawyer, steptoe-johnson, sdny-2019, defence-counsel, correspondence, 2009, 2019
aliasesReid Weingarten, Weingarten, Reid, Reid H. Weingarten

13 min read

⚠ what this page is about, and what it is not

A criminal defence lawyer who represented Jeffrey Epstein in the 2019 federal case, and who had been corresponding with him for nearly a decade before that. The correspondence is the larger part of the record and the part a reader is least likely to expect. No allegation against him was found anywhere in the release, and none is made here.

WhoReid Weingarten, criminal defence lawyer, of Steptoe & Johnson, LLP (NYC), the firm he gives as his own in his signature block on Epstein’s 11 July 2019 filing1
In the release1,848 documents under the full name, 2,629 by surname, across 1,988 pages2
⭐ The actEntered on the court’s docket as counsel of record for Jeffrey Epstein on 8 July 2019, two days after the arrest, and carried there as LEAD ATTORNEY, Designation: Retained, in United States v. Epstein, No. 1:19-cr-00490-RMB (S.D.N.Y.). He signed Epstein’s bail filings of 11 July, appeared in court on 27 August, and is Lead Counsel of Record on the Second Circuit notice of appearance34
And, before thatA decade of correspondence with Epstein, 24 November 2009 to 15 July 2019, 407 documents carrying a message sent under his name2
Where they metNew York and Florida, from the first document onward. The earliest item in the series, of November 2009, is his legal assistant arranging a Florida meeting; a June 2010 message offers another, and no document read for this page connects him to Epstein’s Florida case56

Reid Weingarten is a Washington criminal defence lawyer. In the summer of 2019 he was one of the lawyers who appeared for Jeffrey Epstein after Epstein’s arrest on federal sex-trafficking charges, and he argued for his release on bail. That much is a matter of court record. What the released files add is the ten years before it: Weingarten and Epstein were in regular contact from at least November 2009, and the traffic is social as often as it is professional.

The 2019 case

Epstein was arrested on 6 July 2019 and indicted in the Southern District of New York. The court’s docket enters Weingarten as an attorney for Epstein on 8 July 2019, the day of the arraignment, and carries him as LEAD ATTORNEY, Designation: Retained.3 On 11 July 2019 he signed two filings for Epstein. One was the letter motion to Judge Berman seeking pretrial release, which the docket enters as “from Reid Weingarten”; the other asked the court for leave to file Epstein’s supplemental financial disclosure under seal. The sealing motion closes over his signature:

Respectfully Submitted, Jeffrey Epstein By His Attorneys,

/s/ Reid Weingarten Reid Weingarten Steptoe & Johnson, LLP (NYC)

The financial disclosure mattered because the government was arguing that Epstein’s wealth made him a flight risk. The government’s answer, filed the next day, opens its preliminary statement: “The defendant is a serial sexual predator who is charged with abusing underage girls for years.”4 ⚠ The bail argument is the court’s business and this page does not re-argue it; the point here is only that Weingarten was inside it.

⚠ The last message from him that the e-mail metadata store carries is dated 15 July 2019, written to the prosecutors, three days before bail was denied and under a month before Epstein died: “So in a word I am eager to sit down with you guys to figure out if there is any way forward at all to find common ground in this nightmare…”7

The decade before the case

The correspondence begins on 24 November 2009 and runs to that final message. It is not the traffic of a lawyer retained for a crisis. His subject lines include “Sunday dinner”8, and his meetings with Epstein are booked through Epstein’s assistant Lesley Groff and at the start of the series through his own: “Reid Weingarten has confirmed 7pm sunday”, and, on a March 2011 afternoon, his one-line reply “see you at 8?” ahead of a breakfast the office then put in the schedule.9

⚠ In June 2010, replying inside a thread about his own trial, he wrote: “will be in florida next week…want a visit weds? reid”.6 Florida was not new to the relationship: the earliest document in the whole series, of 24 November 2009, is his legal executive assistant writing from Steptoe & Johnson to ask whether Epstein could meet him in Florida on 1 December 2009.5 Nothing in the release read for this page records whether either meeting took place.

What the 1,848 documents are

A count this size has been an artefact three times on this wiki, so it was measured before anything was written.2

  • 1,988 pages across 1,848 documents, 1.08 pages per document. Hundreds of separate short items, not a photographed book and not a running head.
  • The corpus types 1,274 of the documents as e-mail headers, 202 as calendar entries, 81 as court filings, 28 as memoranda and 25 as travel itineraries. A further 133 fall into twenty-four smaller types, 103 carry no type at all, and two have no row in the type table. ⚠ That spread is the finding: correspondence is sixty-nine per cent of the file and the court record four. The lawyer is a small minority of what is otherwise a decade of e-mail.
  • 407 documents carry a message sent under his name, 668 sender rows in the e-mail metadata store; of the 677 rows the store returns for the surname, nine belong to other people or to a parse fault.
  • ⚠ The surname is the wrong key, and not for the obvious reason: Weingarten alone returns 2,629 documents against 1,848 for the full name, and of the 781 extra, 520 carry a mangled form of his own forename: the extraction reads Reid as Reic, Rcid, Reld and worse. Other Weingartens are in the release and they are few: Ross Weingarten in 7 documents, Michael Weingarten in 14, and an unrelated surname in a Palm Beach property roll.2

What this page does not say

No allegation against him was found anywhere in the release.10

Nothing here describes what he advised. Communications between a lawyer and his client are privileged, the release does not contain his advice, and the page does not infer it from a calendar. ⚠ Nor does the page treat a dinner as evidence of anything beyond a dinner.

The record does not divide into a social decade and then a professional appearance. The first document in the series, in November 2009, is his legal assistant writing from his firm to arrange a meeting; the 2010 and 2011 exchanges run alongside his own trial work; the court’s docket enters him as counsel on 8 July 2019.53 ⚠ What no document read for this page shows is a retainer, an engagement letter, or any statement of what he was engaged to do before July 2019, so the page records the contact and does not characterise it.

Footnotes

Footnotes

  1. The firm. "Reid Weingarten" and Steptoe co-occur in 108 documents. His own signature block gives the firm: “Reid Weingarten / Steptoe & Johnson, LLP (NYC)”, EFTA00028985 p.2, read at the image at 700 dpi. ⚠ An earlier version of this page called him “a partner” on the strength of EFTA00032387 p.1, which is a DIFFERENT lawyer’s signature block on a message he was copied into. No document read for this page states his title, and the page no longer gives one. ↩

  2. The measurement. "Reid Weingarten" returns 1,848 documents and the surname alone 2,629, across 1,988 pages, 1.08 pages per document. ⚠⚠ A count this size is usually an artefact and this one was tested: on this wiki a photographed book’s running head once inflated a subject to several hundred pages, and a firm name inflated another. Neither shape is present and the page-to-document ratio is flat. Corpus documents.doc_type splits the full-name population as email.header 1,274 · calendar 202 · court.filing 81 · memo 28 · travel.itinerary 25, with 133 documents in twenty-four further named types, 103 untyped, and two carrying no row in documents. In the e-mail metadata store he is the sender of 677 rows across 416 documents, 24 November 2009 to 15 July 2019, by year: 2009 3 · 2010 3 · 2011 73 · 2012 124 · 2013 61 · 2014 9 · 2015 46 · 2016 27 · 2017 92 · 2018 125 · 2019 112. ⚠ Forty distinct sender strings match the surname and thirty-six resolve to him, most a redacted address beside the name. Four do not: three are Ross Weingarten, a distinct person who is himself an Epstein correspondent, and one is a mis-parsed To: line in which Weingarten is the recipient. On a Reid-only basis the store holds 668 rows across 407 documents. ⚠ No deduplicated message total is stated here, because the desk has twice printed one that did not reproduce. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  3. The docket. The SDNY CM/ECF criminal docket for 1:19-cr-00490-RMB, printed 29 October 2021, is in the release: EFTA00058418, read at the image at 700 dpi. p.2 carries the attorney block — “Reid Weingarten / Steptoe & Johnson, LLP (NYC) / … / LEAD ATTORNEY / ATTORNEY TO BE NOTICED / Designation: Retained”. p.4 (page stamp EFTA00058421) carries the 8 July 2019 entries — the status-conference minute entry and “Attorney update in case as to Jeffrey Epstein. Attorney Martin R. Weinberg, Reid Weingarten, Marc Allan Fernich for Jeffrey Epstein added” — and the two 11 July entries filed under his name. The Second Circuit ACKNOWLEDGMENT AND NOTICE OF APPEARANCE, Case 19-2221 Document 9, 5 August 2019, naming him Lead Counsel of Record for “Defendant - Appellant Jeffrey Epstein” over /s/ Reid Weingarten: EFTA02824653 p.54, read at the image. His courtroom appearance of 27 August 2019: EFTA02736375 pp.184–185, read at the image; the appearances block reads “STEPTOE & ▮, LLP / Attorneys for Defendant / BY: REID WEINGARTEN” and the transcript records “MR. WEINGARTEN: Good morning, your Honor. Reid Weingarten.” ⚠ The text layer renders that last line “Maid Weingarten”; only the image reads it. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  4. The 2019 case. United States v. Jeffrey Epstein, No. 1:19-cr-00490-RMB (S.D.N.Y.). The motion for leave to file a supplemental financial disclosure, Document 7, filed 11 July 2019: EFTA00028985 pp.1-3, text layer; the certificate of service at p.3 is signed /s/ Reid Weingarten. ⚠ This document family is Bates-stamped PER PAGE: viewer p.3 of that run carries the page stamp EFTA00028987 in its own corner, two numbers above the identifier. The government’s response, Document 11, filed 12 July 2019: EFTA00028785 pp.1-14, text layer, opening “The defendant is a serial sexual predator who is charged with abusing underage girls for years.”, read at the image at 700 dpi; the sentence opens the letter’s PRELIMINARY STATEMENT, not the letter. A supplemental bail letter of 16 July 2019, on co-counsel’s letterhead, closes over an unattributed /s/ and all three counsel’s names, his among them: EFTA00014482 p.9, read at the image. ⚠ An earlier version said it was filed by co-counsel and not by him. ⚠ All read at the image at 700 dpi on 2026-09-19. ↩ ↩2

  5. The first document. 24 November 2009, EFTA00658023 p.1, text layer, not yet read at the image: a message under his display name, written by his legal executive assistant — “I am Mr. Weingarten’s assistant. He asked me to contact you to see if you would be available to meet with him in Florida late afternoon (approximately 4:00 [PM]) next Tuesday, 12/1” — over a Steptoe & Johnson LLP signature block, forwarded on by Epstein with the word “Coordinate”. ⚠ This is the row the metadata store dates as the start of the correspondence, and it was not sent by him; it is a law office making an appointment. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  6. June 2010. “will be in florida next week…want a visit weds? reid”, 14 June 2010, forwarded by Epstein the same day: EFTA00893438 p.1, twin at EFTA00735474 p.1, text layer. The ellipsis of four stops is as the text layer prints it. ⚠⚠ Epstein pleaded guilty in Florida in June 2008 and was a registered sex offender in June 2010; that is context and not an allegation about this subject. ⚠ Nothing in the release read for this page records whether the visit took place. ↩ ↩2

  7. 15 July 2019. EFTA00021400 p.1, text layer, not yet read at the image; his message is timed “Sent: Monday, July 15, 2019 16:47” and the sheet’s own header dates the reply to it Mon, 15 Jul 2019 23:18:43 +0000. ⚠ “Last” is scoped to the e-mail metadata store, which indexes e-mail headers only, and the store is not a date source on this desk — the date here is read off the document. ↩

  8. “Sunday dinner”. His own subject line on a July 2012 exchange arranging, then cancelling, a dinner with Epstein: “Something has come up…can’t make dinner tomorrow…serious regrets…want and need to see jeffrey…is he free monday morn in nyc for bfast? Reid”, 21 July 2012, EFTA00551817 p.1, text layer, not yet read at the image. The phrase appears beside his name in 13 documents. ↩

  9. The meetings, booked through the office. “Reid Weingarten has confirmed 7pm sunday”, 20 May 2011, EFTA00433773 p.1, text layer, forwarding his own “See you then”. The breakfast of 26 March 2011, his “see you at 8?” and the office’s “I will let everyone know you have breakfast tomorrow morning at 8am with Reid.”: EFTA00436294 p.1, twin at EFTA00907411 p.1, text layer. ⚠ EFTA00436294 p.1 read at the image at 700 dpi: the quoted line is clean there and the text layer’s damage is the extractor’s, not the sheet’s. ↩

  10. Absences, each scoped. No allegation against him was found anywhere in the release. No deposition of him, no interview report and no filing naming him as a party or a subject was found. ⚠ Each of these says what was not found, not what does not exist, and ⚠⚠ All six derived stores were searched, with thirteen OCR-tolerant variants, and each size is given because a zero out of 3 and a zero out of 3,863 are different facts: deposition transcripts (3 depositions) nothing · transcripts (1,628) nothing · handwriting transcriptions (54) nothing · spreadsheet corpus (16) nothing · native files (3,863) nothing. The knowledge graph (606 entities, 2,302 relationships) holds him as one node with exactly one edge in the whole graph: communicated_with Jeffrey Epstein. ⚠ The deposition store is three depositions and no absence claim should lean on it; the transcript and native-file stores are the two with weight. ↩

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